


The Beginning of the End

by WorryinglyInnocent



Series: Homeward Bound [7]
Category: Lost
Genre: AU, Canon Divergence, Fix-it fic, Gen, Oceanic Six Claire, season 4, season 5
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-11
Updated: 2018-03-11
Packaged: 2019-03-30 01:16:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13939428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WorryinglyInnocent/pseuds/WorryinglyInnocent
Summary: Continuing theHomeward Boundseries, a canon divergence in which Claire left the island in the season four finale and became part of the Oceanic Six, raising Aaron herself.Three years after escaping the island, Claire meets up with the rest of the Oceanic Six in Los Angeles, and soon realises that no matter what hopes she might have had of moving on, the island will not let her go without a fight.





	The Beginning of the End

After the visit to the lawyer’s office, Claire remembers later, everything happened very quickly. It’s all a blur of activity, without any time to stop and think.

The first thing that she does is take Aaron and her mother back to their hotel, with instructions to stay together and stay safe whilst she goes out to see her old friends. Aaron is a little fractious to see her go, but they’ve brought enough of his toys with him to keep him amused, and he’s tired from the long journey and the different time zones. Claire feels a little guilty at leaving her mother alone with a sulky toddler, but she knows that this is something that she has to do on her own. Depending on what happens when all of the Oceanic Six meet up, she doesn’t want Aaron there to bear witness to it.

She can’t take him to Santa Rosa with her anyway, and that’s her first port of call. She has to see Hurley; it’s been far too long and now that she’s been given this opportunity, she really wants to use it.

It’s once she reaches the clinic that things start to speed up, without any influence on her part. The taxi is almost there when she receives a call from Carole.

_“Claire, sweetheart, I really don’t think that going to the institute is a good idea,”_ she says, and she sounds cagey, like there’s something that she needs to tell Claire but really doesn’t want to.

“What’s wrong, Mum? What’s happened?”

_“I’ve just turned the TV on, there’s a news report… It seems that your friend left Santa Rosa in rather suspicious circumstances.”_

Claire’s stomach churns.

“What do you mean, Mum? What happened?”

But then the taxi is pulling up outside Santa Rosa and she can see for herself that there are a couple of police cars sitting outside and the staff are talking to the officers inside.

“Mum, I’ll call you back.”

_“Claire…”_  But it’s too late, Claire has already hung up and is racing up the driveway towards the front door. She knows that she must look ridiculous. She’s still in the austere, business-like attire that she wore to the lawyers’ office in the hope that despite her comparative youth they would take what she had to say seriously. She didn’t bother changing when she got back to the hotel, just installing her mother and Aaron in the room and dashing straight back out again, perhaps out of an unconscious eagerness to get everything over and done with so that she could get out of America as quickly as possible and return to the uncomplicated life that she knew before. Well, as uncomplicated as it could be. It was never going to be plain sailing and she can accept that, but at the same time, ever since Locke’s visit, it seems that everything’s been happening so quickly and she has no idea how to stop it, like a snowball rolling down a hill that doesn’t seem to have a bottom.

The staff and the police fill her in. Last night, a man in an SUV outside the clinic was murdered, and around the same time, Hurley left the building, possibly aided by an unknown third party. Whether he was taken against his will, or whether he was in on the whole plan, or whether he just saw the opportunity and took it, are still unknown, but Claire is inclined to believe the former. She knows Hurley, she knows from their phone calls what his mental state is like and she knows that this is where he feels safe from the island. He was happy when he was sent back here, almost morbidly so, and she knows that there’s no way he would ever cook up a plan to get himself out of there that involves murder. She tells the police so, and then leaves. There’s no point in her hanging around when she’d only just arrived in the country at the time of the incident and knows nothing about it, and the only reason she came to Santa Rosa in the first place was to see a patient who is now not there.

The taxi takes her back to the hotel and she finally gets changed, sitting on the sofa and watching Aaron with unseeing eyes as she tries to work out what the hell is going on. If she didn’t know better, she’d say that it was all some weird kind of conspiracy. It can’t be luck or fate that all of the Oceanic Six are in Los Angeles at the same time, and that Hurley has been kidnapped out of Santa Rosa at the same time as that. Someone is trying to bring them all together, in the same way that Locke was trying to bring them all together.

Except Locke’s dead now, so she doesn’t know who is pulling the strings this time.

A horrible thought strikes her. Locke had mentioned Ben. He’d said that Ben was off the island. Claire gets the horrible feeling that she knows who is behind all this.

“Claire?”

Carole sits down on the sofa beside her and puts an arm around her daughter.

“What do you need, sweetheart?”

I need to get out of here, Claire thinks. I need to go home and get as far away from all this madness as I possibly can, but I don’t think that the madness is going to let me. So what she really needs, as much as she doesn’t want to admit it, is to face the madness head on and confront it, ask it what the hell it wants from her and reiterate that she’s not going to go back to that hellish island for anybody.

“I don’t know,” she says eventually. “I need answers and peace of mind, but I don’t think that I’m going to get either of them any time soon.”

Carole holds her close and strokes her hair.

“We’re here for you,” she soothes. “Me and Aaron, we’re still here, and we’ll get through this. I’ll get us on the first flight home to Sydney tomorrow.”

Claire nods. Having a definite departure time helps. Soon she can leave all this behind her. She just has to get through whatever tonight brings, because the foreboding feeling tells her that something is going to happen tonight.

Her phone rings, the tone seeming more shrill and urgent than usual even though it’s exactly the same ring as it usually is. It’s Kate, and despite the fact she knows Kate, Claire still answers warily.

“Hello?”

_“Claire, it’s me, are you ok?”_

“Yes, I’m fine, why wouldn’t I be?”

_“No reason, it’s just with all this upheaval I wanted to make sure that you were all right. Jack said that you were in town. Have you been to see Hurley yet?”_

“Yes, only to find that he’s vanished into the ether.”

_“Yeah.”_ Kate sounds agitated.  _“Jack says he’s ok, he knows where he is, which then makes me wonder_ how _Jack knows where he is, and whilst I really shouldn’t be this suspicious, Jack’s been acting very strangely lately and I’m pretty sure that there’s a lot more going on than we think.”_

Kate is scared, although she doesn’t say it in as many words, and Claire is scared, and she has no qualms saying so.

“Kate, can we meet please? Maybe the two of us can work out what’s going on together rather than trying to put the pieces together on our own.”

Kate is more than happy to meet and agrees to come and pick Claire up from her hotel. Carole and Aaron are once more left alone, but with the assurance that they’re all going home tomorrow morning, Claire feels a little less apprehensive.

That, she thinks later, was the perfect example of a false sense of security.

Kate and Claire drive on in silence for a while. The sun is beginning to set and Claire takes a moment to appreciate the beauty of it, and the strange feeling that the sunsets on the island were incomparable to the ones out here in the real world. How the hell can she be feeling nostalgic at a moment like this?

Eventually, once they’re far enough away from the hotel and all the tension that Claire has left in that room, they begin to talk, just about general things, how they’re both doing, how Aaron’s growing, what he’s been up to. They avoid talking about the island at all costs, and they don’t mention the visits that they’ve had from Locke, although they both know, without saying anything, that they have indeed been visited. It’s the elephant in the room that they don’t want to talk about, and know that at some point they’re going to have to. Like it or not, it seems like it’s the island that has brought them all together again here in Los Angeles and maybe Locke and Hurley were right, maybe it’s not done with them yet.

Kate’s phone rings and she pulls over to answer it. Claire can’t hear whoever’s on the other end, but she can tell that it’s Jack. Whatever he’s suggesting, Kate seems reluctant to agree, until she seems to give in with a soft sigh.

“Fine. I’ll come, and I’ll ask Claire, but I’m not kidnapping her.”

The thought of kidnapping brings Claire’s mind full circle to Hurley, and she wonders where he is and how he is.

The call ends and Kate turns to Claire.

“Jack wants us all to meet at the waterfront,” she says. “Sun’s going to be there too, and Hurley. He says he’s got something to tell us all.”

Claire nods. “Ok. Let’s go.” If this is the only chance that she’s going to get to get some answers before she leaves, then she’s going to take it.

Sure enough, everyone is there. Sun is parked up but has not got out of her car. Her eyes raise as Claire and Kate pull up next to her, and she gives them a brief smile, but then she looks down again. It looks like she’s on her phone, playing a video message. Perhaps it’s Ji Yeon. Jack and Hurley are standing out by the water, and Claire’s so happy to see that Hurley’s ok that she runs over to him and throws her arms around him.

“When I saw the news I was so worried,” she says, as Hurley returns her hug. “What happened?”

“To be honest, I don’t really know myself,” Hurley says. “I think that there were some people trying to kill me, and then Jack broke me out of the hospital, but that went kinda wrong and I ended up being wanted for murdering this guy in an SUV, so I’ve been hiding at my house, and now I’m here. And you’re here, and you’re ok!”

Claire nods. “Yeah, I’m ok, Hurley.”

“How’s Aaron, is he here too?”

“He’s back at the hotel with my mum, he’s doing fine. Do you want to come by and see him?” The whole being wanted for murder thing might make that slightly difficult, but at that moment Claire doesn’t really care, she’s just so glad to see that everyone’s in one piece.

It’s Kate who gets straight to the point.

“Jack, why did you bring us all here?”

Jack looks somewhat uncomfortable.

“It wasn’t actually my idea,” he says, and it’s then that Claire realises that they’re not alone.

“Hello everyone.”

There’s something about Ben Linus’s voice that chills Claire to the bone, and it’s not just because her fears that something’s been manipulating them this entire time are partly justified. She doesn’t listen as Ben and Jack talk about how they have to go back to the island and how Ben knows how to get them there. She’s still reeling. Hurley’s protesting; under no circumstances is he going back. Kate is arguing as well, there’s no way in hell that she’s going back either, even though Ben points out that she doesn’t actually have anything in Los Angeles to stick around for, which implies that Jack is definitely on the side of going back to the island.

Claire, on the other hand, definitely has something to stick around for, and all she wants is to go back to the hotel, get Aaron and Carole and get to the airport right now, screw sticking around to wait for a plane in the morning. She’ll take a connecting flight to Hawaii if she has to, she’s not hanging around here.

Hurley leaves, and Kate makes to leave, and Claire goes with her. Out of the corner of her eye, she can see that Sun has pulled a gun on Ben, and whilst she’s not entirely surprised that someone wants to kill him, she is slightly surprised that it’s Sun. Then again, maybe it’s not entirely out of the blue. She had known that Sun was planning something after all, and maybe this is it.

The silence in Kate’s car is a tense one; neither of them speak as they drive back to the hotel, both of them still too shaken by what’s just happened there on the waterfront, by the split that has been driven between all of them now. There’s almost a sense of betrayal, that Jack has somehow sided with the enemy against them, but Claire knows that it runs deeper than that. She just doesn’t want to find out how deep, for fear that she might never get out of that chasm alive.

They park and sit with the engine off for a long time.

“Do you want to come up and see Aaron?” Claire asks. Kate nods.

“That would be nice. Thank you.”

Everything that was already moving very quickly starts moving even more quickly when they reach Claire’s hotel room and find it empty. No Carole, no Aaron, no note, no sign of where they might have gone, no messages on Claire’s phone. She calls Carole. It rings and rings and rings and eventually cuts to her cheerful voicemail telling her that she’s unable to pick up right now but leave a name, number and message and she’ll get right back to you.

Fire burns through Claire’s veins, even as Kate tries to tell her that it’s going to be all right, that they’re going to find them.

Claire calls Jack.

“Are you still with Ben?” she asks as soon as he picks up, before he has a chance to get a word in edgeways.

_“Claire?”_

“Is Ben there?” she growls, and the ice in her voice surprises even her.

The phone is obviously handed over and then it’s Ben in her ear.

_“Hello, Claire.”_

“What did you do to them?” she hisses. “Where are they? Where is Aaron?”

_“They’re perfectly safe, Claire, there’s no need to worry.”_

“WHERE ARE THEY? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO THEM?”

_“I haven’t done anything to them, Claire, I’m not an animal.”_

“Are you sure about that?”

Ben doesn’t rise to it.  _“They’re both safe, I can assure you. No-one is going to harm them, or you.”_

“Yeah, well, I’m going to harm you when I see you,” Claire snarls.

_“I just needed something to make sure that you’d go along with our plans.”_

“You’re a psychopath.”

_“No, I’m merely practical. Come with us. Aaron and Carole will be perfectly fine.”_

He hangs up, and all Claire can do is cry, howling until she’s hoarse and her eyes are dry. Kate holds her as they sit there late into the night, Claire’s sleep-deprived and jet-lagged brain trying desperately to think up a plan to get her family back.

Early in the morning, she gets a text from Jack.

_Ajira flight 316 to Guam._


End file.
